T’s Women’s Fashion Issue: Editor’s Letter

In the natural world, spring is the season of renewal. But in fashion — an unnatural world, though one equally transformative, and one that also runs on its own cycle of birth and death, birth and death — fall is the most fecund time of year. And not just in the fashion world, but in virtually every other creative world as well: art, theater, film, books. For these few months, we are either the watchers or the watched, and by the time the season’s finished, we are drunk with looking, with being challenged to see anew. A successful season in the culture is one that leaves you feeling one part giddy and one part uncomfortable — Is this what a dress looks like now? Is this what a novel should say and do? Is this art, or is it not?

But of all the ways in which art and design test our understanding of the world, one of the most important is how they make us question what exactly beauty is. Great art and design remind us of two things: first, that what is beautiful is not necessarily what is pleasant or pretty; and second, that the search for beauty, in all its forms, is elemental to the human condition. Every person in every culture, no matter how impoverished or restrictive, tries to ornament her life. This desire — to stimulate the senses, to remind ourselves of the wildness of the imagination — is not an indulgence or a luxury, but an instinct, one that defines us as human. What, after all, is the entire arc of history but a compendium of things — the pottery, cloaks, jewelry, houses, furniture, vessels and tapestries that humankind has always made (and will always make) to assert its presence in the world?

Every editor of T magazine has understood this. Our definitions of what beauty looks and sounds and tastes and feels like have been particular to each of us, of course, but the magazine itself has always been consistent in its mission: to find and reveal and present beauty in all its forms, even if sometimes those forms don’t resemble what we understand as beauty at all. Beauty might be something ephemeral, made more potent for the brevity of its life, like a fragile Japanese confection. Or it might be something outlandish and bewitching, like fashion designer Jun Takahashi’s elaborately constructed and composed fall collection, a plucked-from-a-fairy-tale assemblage of puffer-jacketed nuns, feather-headdressed knights and a queen in a shocking-pink skirt of honeycombed silk organza, her hair dressed into two fat ram’s horns. Or it might be something quiet and intimate, like the house Frank Gehry built for the artist Cai Guo-Qiang in rural New Jersey: an old horse farm transformed, with Gehry’s signature exuberant swoops, into a landlocked ark, the physical manifestation of one creative mind paying homage to another. You might find one of these things beautiful, or all of them — or none of them. But you don’t have to like them: You have only to look.

In her story on Takahashi, the writer Gaby Wood notes that the idiosyncratic designer has titled several of his collections ‘‘But Beautiful,’’ which is also the name of a 1947 song composed by Jimmy Van Heusen, with lyrics by Johnny Burke. The first verse goes: ‘‘Love is funny or it’s sad/It’s quiet or it’s mad/It’s a good thing or it’s bad/But beautiful.’’ Takahashi’s world may be a strange, mixed-up, incomprehensible, often confounding place: but it’s his, and it’s beautiful.

The same could be said for our world, too — the one we all inhabit together. Provocative, unsettling, difficult. Foreign, discomfiting, different. All of it, any of it. But — because of it, despite it — beautiful.